‘Through Naval Practice and the Association with Foreigners’ French Nobles’ Participation in Mediterranean Religious Struggles, 1598–1635 Brian Sandberg Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Volume 16, Number 1&2, 2006, pp. 219-227 (Article) Published by Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682142/summary Access provided by Northern Illinois University (18 Jan 2018 19:39 GMT) Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2006 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 16, No. 1/2: 219-227 ‘THROUGH NAVAL PRACTICE AND THE ASSOCIATION WITH FOREIGNERS’ FRENCH NOBLES’ PARTICIPATION IN MEDITERRANEAN RELIGIOUS STRUGGLES, 1598-1635 Brian Sandberg Northern Illinois University' This article examines a group of ‘military migrants’, French nobles who engaged in Mediterranean maritime warfare, in an attempt to reconsider religious violence in the early modern period. The great religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have often been completely divorced from one another in early modem historiography— the Ottoman-Christian wars in the Mediterranean treated separately from the Protestant- Catholic conflicts within Europe. French nobles engaged in religious conflict within France throughout the long French Religious Wars of 1562-1629, but they also were very active in other religious struggles throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Analyzing French nobles’ maritime activities exposes their social networks and their religious activism. Introduction: A Unified Religious Struggle? In June 1619, Sebastiano Montelupo wrote from Krakow thanking a Medici secretary for ‘the good news that you sent me of the peace in France and of the seizure of Turkish vessels by the galleys of the religion of Santo Stefano’. Montelupo found this news ‘carissima’ and prayed that God would maintain the ‘union’ in France and grant ‘prosperous fortune’ to the galleys.2 Montelupo’s linkage of religious conflict within France to Christian warfare against the Ottoman Empire suggests that he saw these conflicts as aspects of a unified religious struggle. Writing from central Europe, Montelupo might be expected to confine his vision of religious warfare to the expanding conflict within the Holy Roman Empire, which would become the Thirty Years’ War, and to the Habsburg warfare on land against the Ottomans. Yet even in the heart of central Europe, Mediterranean maritime warfare could be perceived as a significant facet of a global religious conflict, as Montelupo’s correspondence shows.3 Montelupo’s comparative focus on civil conflict in France in 1619 may at first seem curious. The historiography of early seventeenth-century France Copyright © 2006 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. 220 Brian Sandberg has long portrayed conflicts as unconcerned with religious issues, but instead motivated by noble rivalries, opposition to absolutism, or peasant discontent. However, new research shows that the 1598 Edict of Nantes was never fully implemented and that it hardly ended religious conflict within France.4 Confessional politics and religious activism continued to shape French nobles’ participation in civil conflicts well into the seventeenth century. Thus, when members of the French court reacted to the Ottoman sack of Manfredonia in 1620, they—like Sebastiano Montelupo—could easily draw connections between this disaster and the calamities of civil war in France and Bohemia.5 This article explores the concept of unified religious struggle in the early seventeenth century through the experiences of French nobles involved in Mediterranean maritime warfare. I argue that examining the ‘military migrations’ of French nobles reveals both the religious motives that drew them into maritime conflicts and the social networks that they developed through their participation in Mediterranean warfare. Military Migrations We can better understand the connections between Christian-Muslim and Protestant-Catholic religious violence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by focusing on the noblemen who organized, financed, and directed religious warfare in the Mediterranean. A number of excellent recent studies provide increasing detail on the daily lives of sailors and mariners in the early modem period, although often emphasizing an Atlantic world maritime perspective.6 Many studies probing French nobles’ relationships to maritime activities unfortunately still focus either on analyses of royal fleet development or on prosopographical excavations of admirals and naval officers.7 Too few historians have followed Carla Rahn Philips’s brilliant example in constructing a comprehensive analysis of noble officers and the processes they used in organizing naval warfare.8 The concept of ‘military migration’ can be useful in problematizing nobles’ involvement in early modern maritime operations, especially in trans-national contexts.9 Noblemen serving outside of their native lands have often been labelled by historians as ‘adventurers’ or ‘mercenaries’.10 Such characterizations portray nobles as fundamentally self-interested, emphasizing economic incentives for warfare while denying the possibility that nobles might have had sincere religious motives for engaging in violence. Conceiving of extraterritorial service in warfare as ‘military migration’— including travels, voyages, extended stays, and permanent residency abroad involving military/naval activity—allows us to re-think nobles’ relationships ‘Through Naval Practice and the Association with Foreigners’ 221 with their native society, state institutions, religious bodies, and international organizations. The notion of ‘military migration’ allows us to examine noble involvement in a broad spectrum of maritime activities and to avoid an anachronistic vision of them as ‘naval officers’. French nobles can thus be effectively considered in the context of a new historical literature on early modern maritime history and in comparison with various other social groups throughout the Mediterranean that are examined in recent studies.” Alan James’s important analysis of French naval organization, Navy and Government in Early Modern France, provides a fresh perspective on maritime administrative and naval history in seventeenth- century France.12 Jean-François Dubost’s work on Italian immigrants to France in the early modern period complements these maritime studies and permits a closer examination of Franco-Italian exchanges.13 My current research on the cultural history of violence in southern France and Tuscany during the early seventeenth century builds on these recent studies through an exploration of archival documents, published treatises, and printed pamphlets dealing with French ‘military migrants’. A combination of manuscript correspondence, regional reports, and noble family records conserved in southern French archives départementales, the BibliothèQue Nationale de France, and the Archivio di Stato di Firenze sheds new light on the role French nobles played in religious warfare in the Mediterranean in the early seventeenth century. Various motives led French nobles to become temporary, itinerate, or long-term ‘military migrants’. Early modern noblemen’s education normally included international experiences, and many French nobles sought training in arms and military skills in Italy during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.14 Henri de Gondi, duc de Retz, thus traveled to Florence to study Italian and horsemanship at the Medici court.15 Naval tactics, navigational techniQues, and maritime experience were all valuable skills for early seventeenth-century nobles living along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Henri de Nogaret de La Valette, comte de Candalle, served with the Tuscan galleys to gain naval experience in the 1610s. Maria de’ Medici wrote to Cosimo II de’ Medici that she wanted La Vallette ‘to cruise on your galleys . .. and try to render himself more and more capable to serve the king ... through naval practice and the association with foreigners’.16 Nogaret de La Valette praised the Tuscan Granduca’s fleet as the ‘best and most courageous Academy’ for a first military experience after his cruise on the Tuscan galleys.17 Members of the Schomberg family also sought military and naval education at the Medici court.18 Some French nobles sought not only to acQuire a generalized maritime 222 Brian Sandberg education, but also to have an apprenticeship in naval command with the forces of the Granduca.19 French Nobles and Religious Activism Nobles living in southern France eagerly offered to serve in Italy when wars erupted in Savoy or other Italian states in the early seventeenth century.20 Some of these military activities have been recognized in the historical literature, especially when French and Franco-Italian nobles joined Charles de Gonzague, due de Nevers, in his effort to claim the Mantuan succession from 1627 to 1631.21 Yet, looking beyond state-sponsored intervention in Italy reveals a much wider and more continuous French participation in Italian warfare, especially in Mediterranean maritime conflicts and religious violence against Islamic enemies. Members of the Ornano family were active in Corsican maritime activities in the early seventeenth century.22 Nobles from Marseilles, Toulon, and other southern French ports freQuently offered to serve along with Tuscan maritime forces.23 French nobles seem to have been closely involved with galley-building industries in Toulon, and some of those ships later saw service with Italian-led